Reference is made to prior art FIG. 1a, a schematic block diagram of a group of laboratory machines before duplication, illustrating a prototype environment, which includes a plurality of different prototype machines. Each prototype machine has many attributes, such as type of hardware, whether it is a virtual machine, does it run on bare hardware, memory size, BIOS version, storage controller type, etc. There has been a major problem in the art in duplicating a machine in a timely manner. For example, for software trials, an IT environment is generally established by duplicating disks of prototype machines, assuming one has or can simulate the hardware. It takes both time and resources, such as I/O and disk space, to duplicate a machine's main disk in each machine's replication. An exemplary environment prototype 100 includes an environment machine prototype 101, an environment machine prototype 102 and an environment machine prototype 103.
Prior art systems generally implement a naïve duplication algorithm. Usually, the algorithm is better suited for duplication of an area in the disk that is changed frequently over time, such as for a swap file, or, alternatively better suited for a more static file system structure with many more read operations than write operations. Each algorithm has inefficiencies and other drawbacks. There is no really successful prior art for instantly creating IT environments. However, there is prior art for each algorithm in a different arena—backups.
Therefore, there is a need for a method to clone an environment machine prototype instantly, efficiently and effectively.